On Peter Mandelson
The Only Part of the Epstein Affair that Really Interests Me
Disinterest in Epstein
The Epstein scandal largely doesn’t interest me, because it is principally a criminal rather than political matter. Most of the people involved are over 70 years old. Few of them are still in politics. Even if all of these people had been removed from politics in the 2000s, nothing would fundamentally change. The major events of this century - The War on Terror, The Global Economic Crisis, COVID-19, and the Ukraine War - all would have happened. Liberal democracy would be embedded and debilitated and in a chronic legitimation crisis. All the major issues would be with us - healthcare, housing, higher education, climate change, automation, globalization, capitalism, the rise of China, yada yada yada. We can say that the laws should be enforced or that justice should be done, but this is a trivial thing to say. It also does not need to be said, because there are plenty of powerful people who have plenty to gain from going after the old fogies who stand accused. Yes, the president of the United States is among those accused - but if he were impeached and replaced with the vice president, what would really change?
Disinterest in Chomsky
I am particularly uninterested in the row about Noam Chomsky. For me, Gandhi was the last interesting anarchist.1 Since the middle of the 20th century, we have lived in a heavily corporatized world in which anarchist modes of organizing are clearly non-viable. People born in the last 75 years or so have been constituted by corporate structures and have internalized managerial modes. They are not capable of operating effectively within the framework of anything like the Panchayat Raj, nor are they really interested in operating within that kind of structure. People who attempt to do anarchism in the 21st century have two primary motivations:
Some anarchists are disgusted with the politics of the nation-state. But they don’t offer an alternative politics. Instead, they retreat from the political into a quixotic, bourgeois form of socialism. They then ennoble this form of madness by calling it “social organizing.” But in so far as this activity can be sustained, it remains extremely limited in scope. As soon as an effort is made to expand it, the inability to manage intractable disagreements via political modes leads to infighting, incompetence, and collapse.
Some anarchists have a pathological relationship with authority stemming from dysfunction in their family environment. This manifests as an aversion to the political as such in favor of an unreasonable obsession with horizontalism and operating by consensus.
The Chomsky thing is mainly a row about moral hypocrisy - Chomsky was a moralistic liberatarian socialist, rather than an amoral or anti-moralist Marxist, and therefore he’s expected to have had nothing to do with those rotten elites. People are drawn to Chomsky because they sympathize with his anarchism. They like to think and operate on a purely social level, so of course they think it’s appropriate to judge Chomsky on the basis of social associations rather than political or criminal acts. Anarchists don’t recognize the political or the legal as even potentially having legitimacy, so when someone does something they think is wrong, they resort immediately to social techniques - shunning, blacklisting, being very mean and gossipy about the person, and so on. This is just what anarchists do, and because 21st century anarchists are often mentally unwell, you can’t argue with them. It’s a waste of time. I say this as someone who has some regard for historical anarchism - in the 19th and early 20th century contexts, someone like Bakunin or Tolstoy or Gandhi comes across very differently, because they are intervening in a fundamentally different situation. But today’s anarchists are like modern subjects who pretend we can all be peasants or knights - they don’t make any sense and live in a language palace that is shorn of any contact with concrete instantiations.
They will have their silly fight about Chomsky and there is no point trying to stop them.
No, I’m not interested in Chomsky, but I do think the Peter Mandelson thing can teach us something.
What is Mandelson?
Peter Mandelson is the third man in the New Labour triad - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Peter Mandelson. Both Blair and Brown were prime ministers. But Mandelson was always there, contributing to political strategy and hobnobbing with rich people. He was a Minister without Portfolio, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, European Commissioner, a life peer, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, First Secretary of State, President of the Privy Council, President of the Board of Trade, and, most recently, ambassador to the United States. He was first elected to parliament in 1992, the year I was born.
Mandelson was repeatedly dogged by various scandals, often involving questionable dealings with other elites. He was forced to resign from the cabinet on two separate occasions, but he always came back.
Why did Mandelson always come back? New Labour distinguished itself by making an explicit commitment to modernizing the Labour Party. New Labour accepted the need for a competitive, business-friendly economic policy. This acceptance was embodied in Mandelson, someone who was not just polite to elites, but who always seemed to genuinely respect and admire them. The presence of Mandelson, and of Mandelson’s protégés or preferred candidates, signalled to the markets that this was a Labour government they could trust. But the presence of Mandelson also signalled to Labour’s traditional working-class base that this was not the party they or their ancestors supported in the post-war era.
Over the years, Mandelson became thoroughly aestheticized. He developed into the avatar of New Labour - not Mandelson, but Mandelson. Whereas Tony Blair became associated with the Iraq War, and Gordon Brown became associated with the Global Economic Crisis, Mandelson came to embody the uncut, pure spirit of New Labour. Your attitude to Mandelson as an aesthetic object came to be indicative of your attitude to the New Labour project.
What is Mandelson?
Suppose you were a young British professional in the media or in the Labour Party. You have no substantive political record of your own, and you have yet to develop much in the way of a network. How do you make an impression? You make it, in part, by communicating your aesthetic sensibility, and you do this by articulating your attitude to symbolic totems like Mandelson.
Mandelson can be one of two things:
He is Oedipus, the tragic figure in a Greek play, a man who makes reasonable decisions anyone else could have made in his position, but who nonetheless encounters misfortune.
He is the Prince of Darkness, the villainous embodiment of the ruination of not just the Labour Party, but of the whole of post-war society.
Each of these needs the other - the impulse to regard Mandelson as tragic stems from the fact that others regard him as evil, and the need to regard Mandelson as evil stems from the fact that others regard him as tragic. Did Britain change because it had to change, or because it chose to become something worse? How did Mandelson become Mandelson? Is the nefarious air around Mandelson an unfortunate necessity, part of the price of modernizing Britain, or is it something he has wrought through wickedness? Has Mandelson sacrificed himself for Labour, or has Labour been sacrificed for men like Mandelson?
The bulk of the people who get caught up in these arguments have no way of meaningfully intervening in British politics. For them, Mandelson is a character in a drama - a tragic hero or a villain, but in either case more myth than man. They relate to him as spectators relate to a show. Even the people who now occupy political offices in Britain first encountered Mandelson in this way. The current Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, did not even become an MP until 2015. When he entered politics, Mandelson was already Mandelson. You don’t choose Mandelson to be ambassador simply because he has a lot of experience and a strong personal network. You choose Mandelson because you choose Mandelson.
So, for many years now, the function of Mandelson has been to sort people on the basis of their aesthetic tastes. So much so that, in 1996, Tony Blair said that the work of New Labour would not be complete until the party learned to love Mandelson. The function of New Labour is not simply to do politics or to govern the country, it is to reshape the aesthetic sensibilities of the British working class to the point at which it stops regarding Mandelson as the Prince of Darkness and comes to regard him as New Labour’s Oedipus.
Labour After Mandelson
What does it mean, then, for Mandelson to be not just associated with Epstein, or to have traded sexual inneundos with Epstein, but to have allegedly given Epstein lucrative government secrets? Mandelson is not just someone with bad friends or a sexual deviant, he is revealed to be a traitor, and not just to the working class, but to his own Labour government, to New Labour itself. Mandelson is alive, but Mandelson is dead.
All of the sudden there is a kind of aesthetic verdict - Mandelson was the Prince of Darkness all along. And all those who regarded him as a tragic hero are, in an aesthetic sense, now to be regarded as having been wrong. Jeremy Corbyn takes a victory lap, and Gordon Brown finally gets to have his revenge for past betrayals. Everyone in the Labour Party who has ties to Mandelson is hiding under a rock, hoping this will end. The same goes for everyone in the British press who has written puff pieces glazing the man. All fear political oblivion and the arbitrary social sanctions which the anarchists, in their madness, are always whipping up.
Yet this aesthetic verdict means nothing politically. It does not return Labour to its former state, nor does it return the UK to the 20th century. At most, it will speed up the process of getting rid of Keir Starmer and his gaggle, helping them to be replaced with another gaggle who can’t govern the country or solve its many intractable problems. The next Labour leader will have politics that are very much like Mandelson’s, but they will be careful not to have anything to do with the man. The New Labour show will go on, without its totemic figure. But the British left will be encouraged to treat this purge, when it comes, as a great victory. For a brief time, the lungs of the leftists will be filled with the song of false hope, until, in a few months or at most a few years, the absence of a viable politics in Britain becomes visible again. Eheu!
I even wrote a journal article about Gandhi and a piece for Aeon.